Been noodling around in Help & Improvement recently. Whenever I see a question that I think is too vague to be editable, I've been flagging it as "very low quality".

However, I noticed that an awful lot of these flags ended up as being disputed. A little research suggests this is because I've been using "very low quality" incorrectly. It's supposed to be for near-gibberish, whereas I've been using it for anything I couldn't improve myself - stuff that I ought to have flagged as "too broad" or "unclear what you're asking".

Since a lot of this sort of stuff appears in Help & Improvement, wouldn't it make sense to have access to those flags from the right-hand menu? As best I can see, you can't do anything directly from the page other than edit or mark as "very low quality".

You are doing it right. Read this answer on a related question. The triage queue only requires 500 rep to do reviews, thus it appears that many users aren't flagging to close many questions that should be closed.. .They might even think as long as a question isn't gibberish that it could be improved and just keep on clickin "should be improved", thus ending up with disputed flags for you :(
– CRABOLOApr 20 '15 at 21:20

2 Answers
2

We're going to be beefing the 'brain' of the machine that automatically sends things into triage, especially when it comes to posts by very new accounts where we don't have a lot of history to go on, and the ML stuff comes up pretty inconclusive.

This should be putting a better sampling of stuff into triage and hopefully making the distinction between 'Should be improved' and 'Unsalvageable' a little more clear. We looked at what Triage was feeding the helper queue, and this led to us realizing we needed to get better as far as feeding Triage. tl;dr; you shouldn't see as many of these in the coming weeks.

The single biggest source of noise in the queue seems to be posts that lacked important details in order to become answerable, and no edit in the world (unless it brought those details in) would really help the post. We're working on tuning the feedback loops that puts stuff back into the queue if it didn't see any signs of improvement after being in.

We also need to introduce notices for the post owner that their post is undergoing improvement. That's hopefully going out this week.

Short answer:

"Skip" if the post looks like it could be of decent quality, but you just can't edit it for some reason.

"Very low quality" if it never belonged in the helper queue in the first place, it's just not worth the effort, and would probably do better just being asked again

"Edit" for everything else. Or even a comment if you'd like to edit but can't because the post is missing something.

It's a bit confusing until we manage to get everything tuned just right, we apologize for that. Posts do age out of the queue relatively quickly, and the number of times something is skipped is pretty good signal - we just have to see how some changes we're about to make impacts the data before we start adding more levers :)

The single biggest source of noise in the queue seems to be posts that lacked important details in order to become answerable, and no edit in the world (unless it brought those details in) would really help the post. this is very very true and it makes me feel like I'm wasting most of my time in the H&I queue. Glad to hear that skipping posts also helps out , and that you're working on improvements!
– TimApr 20 '15 at 20:15

7

A big problem is that many people still vote "should be improved" when they mean "should be improved by the author", as opposed to by the community. I think clarifying the options (maybe even by creating two separate buttons for community improvement and author improvement) would be a huge improvement.
– l4mpiApr 21 '15 at 6:58

Just a small suggestion for improvement here: currently the Help & Improvement queue only describes the Skip and Edit actions. It would be interesting to have a little explanation (as that given here) about when to use the Very low quality flag link.
– Paulo FreitasApr 25 '15 at 21:53

2

I have made bad experience with flagging as very low quality, because the moderators decline them "declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it". I would like to see the possibility to flag it directly as off-topic or too broad.
– CSchulzMay 31 '16 at 12:23

You should Skip these questions if you don't feel you can do anything to improve it. (Of course, unless it is of extreme low quality.)

Directly from the Help and Improvement review pages:

Edit if you understand this question well enough to give it clear,
attractive language and formatting

Skip if you don't feel there's
anything you can do to help this question or its author

Questions in Help and Improvement appear because they were flagged as "Should Be Improved" in the Triage queue. Since those working through the Triage queue have the ability to mark questions as low-quality and flag them to be closed or removed, this means any questions in Help and Improvement have already gone through that check.

Also, just because you don't think you can help the quality of a question doesn't mean somebody else can't. If you absolutely think a question should be closed, you could always go directly to the question to cast your vote that way, but in terms of the Help and Improvement queue, unless the question is completely unsalvageable, you should just Skip to the next one if you don't feel that you can make an impactful improvement.

Ok. But why? Why not give users the opportunity to flag the question while they're there? As it stands, I'd "skip" the vast majority of questions I encounter so I just won't use the queue.
– Bob TwayApr 20 '15 at 14:27

Questions in H&I comes from the Triage queue, so they've already gone through the check on low-quality and are simply there to be improved (if possible).
– Michael IrigoyenApr 20 '15 at 14:36

1

Interesting. That would suggest that Triage isn't working terribly well then. I keep seeing a lot of stuff that ought to have been flagged in H&I.
– Bob TwayApr 20 '15 at 14:37

This would be valid advice if it weren't for the fact that many questions are incorrectly marked as "should be improved" or even "looks ok" in triage (one example for 10k users here: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/290441/failed-triage-non-audit). The option to flag a post in the HIQ was introduced because of those false positives.
– l4mpiApr 21 '15 at 6:53